I have said before that i see no purpose in allowing dangerous apex predators like Bears to roam loose. Here is but one example of what damage they can cause when not properly managed (contained to SMALL protected, limited access areas).

updated 7/29/2010 12:21:09 PM ET
Share Print Font: +-COOKE CITY, Mont. — A female grizzly bear suspected of killing one person and injuring two others during a late-night rampage through a campground near Yellowstone National Park has been captured, wildlife officials said Thursday.

The grizzly, estimated to weigh 300 to 400 pounds, was lured into a trap fashioned from culvert pipe Wednesday evening, then left in place to attract her year-old offspring. By Thursday morning, two of her cubs had been caught and the third could be heard nearby, calling out to its mother.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard said he was confident they had captured the killer bear because it came back to the same site where the man was killed early Wednesday.

Sheppard described the rampage — in which campers in three different tents were mauled as they slept — as a highly unusual predatory attack.

"She basically targeted the three people and went after them," Sheppard said. "It was like an archery hunter who gets between a sow and her cubs and she responds to protect them."

Officials have said the sow will be killed. State and federal wildlife officials will determine the fate of the cubs. Sheppard said they are unlikely to be returned to the wild.

'I screamed, he bit harder'
A woman who was attacked by the bear said she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone.

Appearing on the network morning talk shows from a Wyoming hospital, Deb Freele of Ontario said she woke up just before the bear bit her arm.

"I screamed, he bit harder, I screamed harder, he continued to bite," she said.

Her survival instinct kicked in, and she realized that the screaming wasn't working.

"I told myself, play dead," she said. "I went totally limp. As soon as I went limp, I could feel his jaws get loose and then he let me go."

She said the bear was silent.

"I felt like he was hunting me."

A frequent camper, Freele said that she was already prepared to go camping again hours after the attack, though she acknowledged that it will take time to recover both physically and emotionally.

She suffered severe lacerations and crushed bones from bites on her arms. The male survivor suffered puncture wounds on his calf. The nature of the dead victim's wounds were not revealed.

The names and ages of the male victims had not been released.

Worst incident since 1980s
The bear attack was the most brazen in the Yellowstone area since the 1980s, wildlife officials said.

One camper at the Soda Butte Campground said he heard the screams from two of the attacks.

Don Wilhelm, a wildlife biologist from Texas, thought the first scream was just teenagers, maybe a domestic dispute in the middle of the night. He tried to go back to sleep, stifling thoughts that a beast might be lurking outside his family's tent.

Minutes later, another scream — this one coming from the next campsite over, where a bear had torn through a tent and sunk its teeth into Freele's limb.

"First she said, 'No!' Then we heard her say, 'It's a bear! I've been attacked by a bear!" said Wilhelm's wife, Paige.

By that point, the bear already had ripped into another tent a few campsites away, chomping into the leg of a teenager who had been sleeping with his family. The solo camper who was killed was at the other end of the campground.

Then, the screams stopped.

After a quick parental back-and-forth over whether to shield their 9- and 12-year-old sons with their bodies or make a break for it, the Wilhelms took advantage of the silence and darted to their SUV.

They drove around the campground, honking their horns and yelling out the windows to alert other campers. Along the way, they met with a truck leaving the campground with the second victim — a teenager who apparently tried in vain to fight off the bear by punching it in the nose.

"It was like a nightmare, couldn't possibly happen," Paige Wilhelm said later.

In 2008 at the same campground, a grizzly bear bit and injured a man sleeping in a tent. A young adult female grizzly was captured in a trap four days later and transported to a bear research center in Washington state.

The latest attack had residents and visitors to this national park satellite community on edge. Many were carrying bear spray — a pepper-based deterrent more commonly seen in Yellowstone's backcountry than on the streets of Cooke City.

"The suspicion among a lot of the residents is that the bear they caught (in 2008) was not the right one," said Gary Vincelette, who has a cabin in nearby Silver Gate.

Last year, another grizzly broke into three cabins in Silver Gate, said Vincelette. That bear was shot and killed by a resident when it returned to the area.

"Three attacks in three years — we haven't ever had anything like that and I've been coming up here since I was a kid," Vincelette said.

About 600 grizzly bears and hundreds of less-aggressive black bears live in the Yellowstone area.

The region is pasted with hundreds of signs warning visitors to keep food out of the bruins' reach. Experts say that bears who eat human food quickly become habituated to people, increasing the danger of an attack.

Yet in the case of the Soda Butte Campground attack, all the victims had put their food into metal food canisters installed at campsite, said Fish, Wildlife and Parks Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard.

"They were doing things right," Sheppard said. "It was random. I have no idea why this bear picked these three tents out of all the tents there."

The 10-acre Soda Butte campground in Gallatin National Forest has 27 sites. Sparsely populated and hemmed in by mountains, the Yellowstone wilderness surrounding Cooke City is home to numerous bears. A creek that passes through the Soda Butte Campground is frequently used as a travel corridor by wildlife, Sheppard said.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

If people were allowed to hunt these bears with MUCH more liberal limits, there would be fewer bears per acre and more fear of humans by bears, rather than the "wonder if that has a cookie for me" attitude some have developed.

Keep them scared, keep them contained, keep them fewer, and keep your fellow humans/Americans alive & not living in fear.

I'm sure some of the die-hard conservationistas will harp on the "but i want my kids to be able to see a bear" bit; take your kid to a zoo; want your kid to see bears in their "natural enivironment" (yeah Yogi, at the park ) then take them to a BIG zoo.

While I'm not happy about the death of a fellow Michigander, if saving lives is the issue, it would seem more effective to eliminate 5 gallon buckets (one of the deadliest devises of man, known to kill large numbers of children every year) than go after the bears.

How come the native american could have all the game they ever wanted to eat and they never had to manage crap?

Gello I like you man but this is the dumbest thing I have ever seen you post. Bears live in the woods when you go in to the woods that the bears live in you take a chance of being eaten by them. How hard is that.

Education is the key to saving lives not going into the woods with a effing fire bomb and screaming 'CRY HAVOC AND KILL ALL THE BEARS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA".

You know how I feel. It is not the bears fault. if the stupid humans would not feed them learn how to store food so that it doesn't attract them, then there would be no problem.

cheetahs, Lions, Tigers are all apex predators are you really saying lets kill them all? IIRC Hippos kill more humans in a year than all the bears world wide do. Yet they are not apex predators so your OK with letting them live on right? Last time I looked humans kill way more humans than bears do who are you going to start killing and when? I think we should start with all the idiots that burned up their brains on DRUGS.

I say spend more time killing that kid toucher's and we will have a much safer world for everyone to live in.

How come the native american could have all the game they ever wanted to eat and they never had to manage crap? Population Density.

Education is the key to saving lives not going into the woods with a effing fire bomb and screaming 'CRY HAVOC AND KILL ALL THE BEARS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA". Firebombs wouldn't be appropriate; there could be accidental forest fires.

You know how I feel. It is not the bears fault. if the stupid humans would not feed them learn how to store food so that it doesn't attract them, then there would be no problem. There was no evidence in this case of a food storage/human food handling problem. That did surprise the wildlife officer.

cheetahs, Lions, Tigers are all apex predators are you really saying lets kill them all? IIRC Hippos kill more humans in a year than all the bears world wide do. Yet they are not apex predators so your OK with letting them live on right? There aren't that many free-range Cheetahs, Lions, Tigers, or Hippos here in North America; they would be the problems of the continents of Africa and Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Howsomever, if the wildlife managers ran across a stray tiger while properly containing or exterminating da bears, it should also be contained/managed/etc.

Last time I looked humans kill way more humans than bears do who are you going to start killing and when? I do have a list of "humans" that i personally think should be more "managed" as well; that Chavez fellow comes to mind & that goofball in North Korea, however they are also not on U.S. soil.

I say spend more time killing that kid toucher's and we will have a much safer world for everyone to live in.They are harder to pick out in a crowd than a bear (some look just like regular humans until they are caught), but are the target of many current "management" (probation & parole) systems, as they should be to protect our groundwater from their rotting corpses.

I side with the bears. You are in their home, you should respect them as you would have a guest respect you.
JD

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That's what i'm saying; let's evict them & THEN enjoy their homes (kinda like da illegals).

Just think what lovely rugs they would make people. Not to mention that we could laugh at the traditionalists in Asian for eating bear penis (or gall bladder, w/e).

I was disappointed that this Mama Grizzly didn't end up taking a bite of a 12 guage, American Express style (didn't leave home without it). I wonder if Ms. Palin would consider this bear for a mascot position?

Lots of animals in North America are dangerous, and why focus on the natural ones when, we have THOUSANDS of 2 legged ones walking North from the Spanish speaking nations to impose their own brand of havoc.

I watched the victim's interview on Good Morning America. She claimed this bear was not a normal bear because it attacked her (or something along those lines). If she thinks "normal" bears don't attack people she's going to wind up in the same position in the future. That's simply a survival instinct, see food and eat it.

While I don't agree with trying to kill them all, I also don't agree with sanctuaries for them either. Most of our surounding counties are bear sanctuaries the game wardens bring the nueisance bears form the smokey mountains to our area. I went all of my growing up years without ever seeing a bear and I was ok with that. We own about 100 acres, mostly mountain that borders national forest and is included in the sanctuary. Many of our farmer now are having lots of problems out of the bear especialy for corn and they have lost fear of humans. So I think they should be thinned some just by opening a regular season for them in our area.
If you don't agree with me you have probably never looked in the eyes of a 500 pound black bear while picking corn like I have. I would recomend it to anyone who has been constipated, it is guarenteed to cure that.

The animals of the Earth dangerous or not have more right to the land than we do. Remember we are encroaching on their habitats not the other way around. As a hunter I will say this is just dumb as hell. You have more chance of me beating you and jamming a rusty nail in your pee hole than you have of getting mauled by a predatory animal. Do you really want those odds? I jammed a rusty nail in my pee hole and I assure you you do not want that.

I tent camp in bear country every now and then. I sleep with my .44 under my head and my .338 at my side. I realize a bear could bite through the tent into my head and kill me before I could react. I'm going to live my life, I take what precautions I can (I'm not stupid) but nobody gets out of here alive.
Why do we call Gello a weed puffing vegetarian hippie? I have no knowledge of this, and even if I did I wouldn't throw stones.

Let's outlaw cars, cheeseburgers, alcohol, and make everybody live in bubbles so as not to contaminate eachother.

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If it is contaminating others that people are worried about, then lets outlaw sex!!!

As for this bear argument...... I worked at the nature center here in Ohio when I was younger for about 4 years or so. One of the things I done there was educate others about how to deal with the local wild life.... mainly reptiles. There are a bunch of people that want to kill all of the venomness snakes, but I tried to talk them into living together. I would say things like, "don't leave sheet metal lay on the ground or anything along those lines.". I would also say that they shouldn't give a mouse any reason to visit them and tell them how to avoid that problem. I taught how to safely remove snakes and what to do if confronted by one.

If everyone would adopt thisbway of thinking then animals wouldn't be a problem. You aren't a natural food source to them. So they have no need to come to you, and if they do then eliminate that need.

We can live peacefully with all animals most of the time, and when the peace goes out the window, well, I believe that is why the .500 magnum was invented.